Catering arrangements are available on request, and on an ad hoc basis with the guest directly employing the caterer.

1. Informal arrangements

In the case of informal arrangements (e.g., lobster dinners at the house, picnics in Acadia National Park), the housekeeper and others employed by her can accommodate gatherings of 10 - 12 people.

2. Formal arrangements

   As to formal arrangements which might include cocktail parties and/or dinners at the house, the property owner can recommend as a caterer a person of exceptional qualifications, and whom celebrities employ in the US and abroad.

1. Air


1. Bangor International Airport

The property is easily accessible via Bangor International Airport. Travel from Bangor to the property in Bar Harbor is 75 - 90 minutes by car. Several rental car agencies are available at the airport.

Alternative flight services include:

1. Commercial flights

The Bangor International Airport offers several commercial carriers serving major cities in the US. Some are: Continental, Delta, US Airways, Northwest.

2. Private planes

The Bangor Airport also offers an extensive civil air service.

2. The Bar Harbor Airport

Notwithstanding its name, the Bar Harbor Airport is located just north of Bar Harbor, in Trenton. It is extremely proximate to the subject property, a 20-minute drive.

Flights from Boston are just one hour or less in duration. The trip over the islands in the Gulf of Maine and in Penobscot Bay is spectacularly beautiful.

Alternative flights include the following:

1. Commercial flights

The Bar Harbor Airport provides commercial service from Boston by Colgan Air, which is US Airways.

2. Private planes

The Bar Harbor Airport accommodates private planes, including jets. In fact, on summer and fall weekends, many jets line the tarmac in Trenton.

Upon request, the property owner can arrange for the charter of a private plane capable of carrying six passengers from Boston or from Boston suburbs.

2. Ground transportation


1. Rental cars

Rental cars are available at both the Bangor and Trenton airports.

2. Train service

Train service is available from Boston to Portland, from whence one can drive along the Coastal Route to Bar Harbor.

3. Bus

Bus service (Peter Pan, Bonanza) is available from Boston to Bangor, and on to Bar Harbor.

(Travel by bus would seem to be an undistinguished way to travel, and it is. But a regular customer was no less than Brooke Astor. Mrs. Astor annually made the trip between the Ritz in Boston and the bus station in Bangor, first in the spring and then back again in the fall. She had an entourage of just one minder who shared with her a wicker basket containing a discreet bottle of wine and several sandwiches sans crusts).

1. Historical perspective

Hulls Cove and Bar Harbor and Mount Desert Island are so wonderfully historic that guests coming to the Hulls Cove property during the last 15 years have often been glad that they did some reading about that area before they arrived.

For example, Bar Harbor’s first summer vacationers were the prehistoric Red Paint Indians who came to the island, and particularly to Hulls Cove, during the summer months, beginning 6,000 years ago after a mile-high glacier had retreated from what is now Coastal Maine and the Maritimes. The Indians’ artifacts are still sometimes found on the beach at Hulls Cove.

In 1604, Samuel de Champlain made Hulls Cove his anchorage in that part of North America, in order to obtain from a brook flowing into Hulls Cove, a year-round supply of potable water. He would claim for Catholic New France the great unexplored land mass lying to the north and northeast of Mount Desert Island as well as in Quebec on the St. Lawrence River and eventually south as far as what is now New Orleans.

Champlain and his French successors would confront an equally militant Protestant New England centered in Boston but already establishing itself on Monhegan Island and elsewhere along the Maine coast and its riverways, for hundreds of miles to the west and southwest of Mount Desert Island.

Champlain’s arrival helped initiate 150 years of murderous thrust-and-parry land claims throughout what is now New England and Eastern Canada. The first encounter would come quickly, in 1613, when colonists in Jamestown sailed north from Jamestown and past the fledgling Plymouth Colony to Mount Desert Island, whereupon the Jamestown raiders utterly eradicated the French settlement there.

Ironically, it was the French, the foes of the English-speaking colonists for most of two centuries, who secured for the Americans their victory over the British in the American Revolution. Perhaps appropriately enough, when the American victors parceled out to themselves most of New England’s real estate, the plum that was much of Mount Desert Island went to a French woman who was a friend of Lafayette – possibly the first single woman to be so enfranchised as an owner of land in the United States.

The beneficiary, Madame Gregoire, lived at Hulls Cove, just across the cove from the subject property. She is buried in a cemetery very near the subject property, on a hillside overlooking Hulls Cove and what had been her 40,000-acre island.

Bar Harbor (originally named Eden) gained social recognition through the “rusticators” who included many of the most famed artists of the late 1800's. Bar Harbor achieved lasting distinction when the Vanderbilts and Astors brought simultaneously to Newport, RI and to Bar Harbor, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the residential monoliths of the Gilded Age.

Millikens, Morgans, Rockefellers, Pulitzers, Dorrances, Fords and others followed to Mount Desert Island.

Teddy Roosevelt, who founded the National Park System, stayed at Hulls Cove as a young man. His grandson of the same name latter lived on the island most of his life.

Charles Eliot, a fellow Harvard graduate along with Teddy Roosevelt, and fellow pioneering conservationist, did much to create – with backing from the Rockefellers – the great Acadia National Park, the first national park east of the Mississippi. Acadia is now the 2nd-most-visited national park in the U.S.

Until she died last year, centenarian, philanthropist, and widely-respected Brooke Astor had been the Island’s most recent reigning celebrity, a crown tarnished by her son who narrowly escaped being labeled a convicted felon. Brooke Astor’s place in the social pantheon of Mount Desert Island has now been filled by Martha Stewart who is, in fact, a convicted felon.

A fabled and colorful place, Mount Desert Island.

2. Suggested reading

A few of the many books worth taking up before coming to Hulls Cove / Bar Harbor / Mount Desert Island / Acadia National Park might include:

1. Douglas Brinkley’s new book, The Wilderness Warrior, as to Teddy Roosevelt (who vacationed at Hulls Cove as a young man) and the founding of the National Park System


2. History of Mount Desert Island by renowned author Sam uel Eliot Morrison who lived on the Island when not teaching at Harvard, and who was best known as the author of the encyclopedic and legendary History of the United States Navy in World War II commissioned by FDR.


3. 12,000 years and American Indians in Maine by Bruce Bourke, including reference to prehistoric Indians at Hulls Cove.


4. Librarian Gladys O’Neill’s core-curriculum Lost Bar Harbor, which includes photos of historic mansions built during the gilded age, including homes constructed at Hulls Cove.


5. Empires Collide as to the French and Indian Wars which, it might be said, began on this continent when Protestant colonists from what is now Southern New England arrived on Mt. Desert Island to break up a new Catholic French settlement on MDI, primarily by destroying the encampment and by then setting adrift in the North Atlantic the settlement’s two Jesuit priests


6. Almost any biography of Samuel de Champlain, including The Founder of New France.


7. The venerable The Last Resorts, commentaries on Bar Harbor by the peerless high-society observer Cleveland Amory.


8. Sargent F. Collier’s post-WW II, period-piece Green Grows Bar Harbor, probably written in part on the lawn above the tennis courts at the Bar Harbor Club, even as the Club itself was browning.


9. History of Acadia National Park by founder of the park, George Dorr with more than a little help from the Rockefellers.


10. The Last Mrs. Astor by Frances Kiernan which recounts the life of recently-deceased Brooke Astor, including her marriage (one of plural marriages) in Bar Harbor.


11. Walter Cronkite’s lush North by Northeast as to sailing and appreciating the Maine Coast.


12. Any of several colonial histories of Maine from rare book collections, antiquarian dealers.


3. Where to look for books


1. Sherman’s Bookstore in Bar Harbor is a delightful anachronism , and a great bookstore.


2. The Jesup Memorial Library offers gorgeous turn-of-the-century architecture, a fabulous book collection, the actual quiet of old-time libraries, great art, the best of summertime sidewalk used book sales, and superlative librarians. Pray for one rainy day during your stay.